The great white shark ... simply jawsome

by JAMES DELINGPOLE

Last updated at 11:28 27 January 2007

They have 300 teeth in seven rows, bite with a pressure of three tonnes and can sense your pulse from miles away. No wonder the diver who was half swallowed by a shark - and lived - is the world's luckiest man

Never in my life have I felt fear like I felt in the jaws of that white shark,' said Australian diver Eric Nerhus, recovering in hospital earlier this week - and who could blame him? To be attacked by a great white shark must be terrifying enough.

To be swallowed by one head-first, as he was, and then spend two whole minutes stuck inside the cave-like darkness of its horrible maw is a horror almost beyond imagining.

Nerhus was savaged off the far eastern tip of Victoria, 250 miles from Sydney, while diving for abalone, a type of shellfish. When the shark briefly released its grip and tried to strike again, Nerhus fought back with the heavy metal chisel he used to prise shellfish off the rocks, and which, miraculously, he hadn't dropped in shock.

He dug the chisel into its eyes and the sensitive area around its snout, and the shark let him go.

He must be the luckiest man alive. Of all the creatures on earth, none is quite so perfectly attuned to killing as Carcharodon carcharias. In its gaping jaws are seven rows of serrated, triangular teeth - perhaps 300 in all - which it uses to rip and tear huge chunks of flesh from its prey, shaking its head from side to side like a terrier with a rat.

The pressure of that dreadful bite - the equivalent of three tons per square centimetre - might easily have cut Nerhus in half, had he not been protected by his lead-lined diver's jacket.

Fully grown great whites have been known to reach 20ft in length and weigh as much as two tonnes. Though their eyesight is poor, the sensors in their snouts can detect the electromagnetic fields emitted by their prey from many miles away.

But far from being indiscriminate killing machines, they are actually intelligent, subtle creatures. Rather than charge their prey headlong, they prefer to stalk it from below (their dark upper skin making them all but invisible), which is why many victims - Nerhus included - don't even see the shark until it has taken its first bite.

They are also surprisingly cautious. To avoid being injured by their prey (an angry bull seal, say, could do a great white serious damage), they prefer to take one huge bite, then circle their victim until it has bled half to death. This may be another reason for Nerhus's surviva. Great whites don't like it when you fight back - nor do they expect it.

Just why is it, though, that tales like Nerhus's continue to exert such a powerful grip on the public imagination? Surely by now we ought to have seen quite enough of those nature documentaries telling us that Jaws is fiction, not fact, and that sharks are beautiful, endangered creatures more deserving of respect than fear?

Surely we all ought to be aware that we're 30 times more likely to get struck by lightning than fall victim to one of the 60-odd shark attacks (only about five of them fatal) recorded each year?

As the author of Fin, a semi-autobiographical novel about a man who believes it is his destiny to be eaten by a great white shark, these are questions I've pondered often over the years.

The conclusion I've reached is that our fear of sharks is so deeply ingrained it defies all logic. Granted, there are many more prolific killersofmen in the world - snakes, crocodiles, lions and (by far the worst) bees and malarial mosquitoes. But none of them induces nearly the same degree of visceral terror.

This terror derives from a combination of things. Partly, it's down to our atavistic dread, inherited from our earliest ancestors, of the deep, dark unknown, and of being eaten alive by vicious predators with nasty, pointy teeth.

PARTLY, it's down to the shark-horror iconography planted in our heads over the years by films and books like Jaws: the gaping, bloodied mouth; the sinister, triangular fin cutting through the water. And partly, it's down to that cold, fishy mercilessness: the awful sense that here is a primaeval killing machine, virtually unchanged since the dawn of time, which cares not a jot what delightful, life-loving individuals we are but sees us merely as hunks of warm, pulsing, edible flesh.

Few of us can remember a single story about the numerous people eaten every year by lions, tigers, crocs and bears. But we all seem to know plenty involving sharks. This was one of the things I found so gratifying when researching my book: almost everyone you meet has a shark tale to tell.

I remember talking to the lovely actress Angharad Rees and being treated to a truly chilling story about the time near Hong Kong when, while walking along some cliff tops, she had watched helplessly as a huge shark stole up on a swimmer and savaged him half to death.

And who could forget the tale of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, torpedoed in the Philippine Sea in July 1945? Of the 1,199 crew, only 317 survived - many of the rest being consumed by sharks during the five ghastly days they spent floating in open water. The men positioned themselves in protective circles, thrashing desperately whenever one of the thousands of circling sharks drew close.

But it was hopeless. A leg would be ripped off here, an arm there, and the feeding frenzy would begin, as Quint, the hoary old sea captain and Indianapolis survivor, memorably recalls in Jaws: 'You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya.'

Before the Indianapolis, history's worst shark-related disaster was probably the sinking of the British troopship HMS Birkenhead near Cape Town in 1852, when many of the 400 or more men who swam ashore - having gallantly given the life boats to women and children - were killed by the great whites patrolling those waters.

Despite such atrocities, the threat posed by sharks (though first recorded by Herodotus in the 5th century BC) was not widely appreciated outside seafaring circles until 1916 when the infamous Jersey Shore Attacks generated headlines across the world.

Over 12 days, four swimmers (one, a 12-year-old boy) were killed by a rogue shark along an 80-mile stretch of the New Jersey coastline. The shark was the model for Peter Benchley's Jaws.

Since then, the public appetite for shark horror stories has outstripped that of even the most ravenous maneater. Probably the most amazing escape was the one in 2001 by an eight-year-old boy who was grabbed by a 7ft bull shark in Florida.

The boy's furious uncle waded into the water, grabbed it by the tail and, with the help of others, dragged the shark ashore and shot it. The boy's severed arm was later retrieved from the shark's mouth and sewn back on by microsurgeons.

However, if I had to choose the most disturbing incident, it would probably be the case of Thomas and Eileen Lonergan, a hapless couple unwittingly left behind by their dive boat the Outer Edge, on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Their bodies were never recovered, but four months later a diver's slate was washed up in a mangrove swamp, with the desperate message: 'We have been abandoned by Outer Edge. Help!'

AN Australian diver who spoke at the boat skipper's trial for manslaughter (he was subsequently acquitted), speculated on their fate. 'Tiger sharks are very cautious sharks,' he said. 'They just circle and watch. They do this for an hour before moving closer and may follow you for another hour before they take that first bite. And then you don't have a hope.'

Before their actual deaths, in other words, the poor Lonergans had time to die a thousand imaginary ones - especially when those tigers came in for their final few dummy runs, a practice known as 'bumping', and gave the shrieking couple their first exploratory nudges with their sandpaper-rough skin.

Little wonder that when the story became the film Open Water, the horror depicted was at least as much psychological as physical.

Living as most of us do on an island surrounded by cold water containing little more deadly than plankton-eating basking sharks, we British ought perhaps to have other things to worry about.

But before we get too complacent, let's not forget that there are killer sharks just across the way in the Mediterranean, and that there have been fatal attacks there as recently as 1989.

Furthermore, with long-haul travel so commonplace, it's scarcely unusual these days to find yourself on holiday in a shark attack hotspot. Florida has by far the worst record, with between ten and 30 attacks each year. Australia, however, holds the record for the most fatalities - 136 recorded since 1700.

Indeed, there's a shark out there to get you on almost every conceivable occasion. If you're in temperate waters (off California; South Africa; Australia; New Zealand; some say even the English Channel), it'll be a great white.

If you're in the tropics, it will probably be the tiger - known, because of its voraciousness, as the 'dustbin of the seas'. If your plane has crashed or your boat has sunk midocean, it will be oceanic whitetips (which wreaked such havoc on the crew of the U.S.S. Indianapolis).

You're not even safe in fresh water: the notoriously aggressive bull shark can swim for hundreds of miles up rivers. And don't try kidding yourself you'll be safe if you stay close to the beach: the majority of shark attacks occur in water less than 5ft deep.

Over the past century, the number of recorded attacks per decade has risen drastically. In the 1900s and 1910s there were fewer than 50 per decade; by the 1990s there were nearly 500, a figure which the world's official monitoring body - the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) in Florida - expects will be surpassed in the 2000s.

But this doesn't necessarily mean sharks are becoming more of a threat. As the ISAF stresses, not only are attacks more likely to be reported than they were a century ago, but there are many more humans spending much more time in traditional shark territory. Relative to the number of people in the sea, shark attacks are becoming less prevalent, not more so.

One of the things the late Peter Benchley regretted about Jaws was the way it demonised great white sharks. He spent his later years campaigning to preserve them and the great white is now a protected species through most of the world.

Having seen them in their natural habitat, cage-diving off Dyer Island in South Africa, I can understand how he felt.

It's an extraordinary experience. You'll be waiting alone, a little trepidatiously, in your flimsy cage wondering if anything's going to happen. Then, almost by magic, one will suddenly materialise from the blue-green murk, with its distinctive conical snout and the pale white underbelly that gives it its name.

You're far too astonished to be scared. Here you are, underwater, barely a couple of inches from the world's most legendary predator and all you can do is marvel at its grace and beauty. It will linger awhile, studying you with its dark eyes. Then, with a flick of its tail, it will be gone as swiftly as it came.

Our ecological awareness has come a long way since Jaws. Cagediving and shark-watching are now much more popular as adventure sports than shark hunting.

With shark populations in serious decline (some, says the charity Shark Trust, down to 2 per cent of their original levels) because of overfishing, the public is finally beginning to wake up to the fact that these sleek predators of the deep are far more in need of protection from us than we are from them.

As shark conservationists rightly point out, the chance of being attacked by a shark is excedingly unlikely, far smaller than of winning the Lottery.

But just because something probably won't happen doesn't mean it can't happen. And it is that possibility, however slim, which will, for many of us, continue to be the stuff of nightmares.